Christo­pher Soghoian, a grad­u­ate stu­dent at Indi­ana University’s School of Infor­mat­ics and Com­put­ing, has made pub­lic an audio record­ing of Sprint/Nextel’s Elec­tron­ic Sur­veil­lance Man­ager describ­ing how his com­pa­ny has pro­vid­ed GPS loca­tion data about its wire­less cus­tomers to law enforce­ment over 8 mil­lion times. That’s poten­tial­ly mil­lions of Sprint/Nextel cus­tomers who not only were prob­a­bly unaware that their wire­less provider even had an Elec­tron­ic Sur­veil­lance Depart­ment, but who cer­tain­ly did not know that law enforce­ment offers could log into a spe­cial Sprint Web por­tal and, with­out ever hav­ing to demon­strate prob­a­ble cause to a judge, gain access to geolo­ca­tion logs detail­ing where they’ve been and where they are.

It’s well known by now (at least, to any­one who pays atten­tion) that cell phones are used to spy on the loca­tion and move­ment of their own­ers. This is the first solid infor­ma­tion I’ve seen on just how often the cops spy on people–and keep in mind that this is only one com­pa­ny. It’s pret­ty much guar­an­teed that oth­er com­pa­nies are equal­ly eager to col­lab­o­rate with Big Broth­er.

As the law cur­rent­ly stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track peo­ple with­out vio­lat­ing their con­sti­tu­tion­al rights — even if the dri­vers aren’t sus­pects.

Offi­cers do not need to get war­rants before­hand because GPS track­ing does not involve a search or a seizure, Judge Paul Lund­sten wrote for the unan­i­mous three-judge pan­el based in Madis­on.

That means “police are seem­ing­ly free to secret­ly track anyone’s pub­lic move­ments with a GPS device,” he wrote.

The court wants the leg­is­la­ture to fix it:

How­ev­er, the Dis­trict 4 Court of Appeals said it was “more than a lit­tle trou­bled” by that con­clu­sion and asked Wis­con­sin law­mak­ers to reg­u­late GPS use to pro­tect again­st abuse by police and pri­vate indi­vid­u­als.

I agree. Also note that this real­ly only applies to cops spy­ing on dri­vers who don’t have cell phones. If you’ve got a cell phone, it’s sim­pler and cheap­er for the cops to spy on you using the track­ing device you paid for and vol­un­teered to car­ry around rather than going to the trou­ble of bug­ging your car.